TIIE STt\TE order, and by sacrificing individualities, and little organisms, in order to absorb them in a vast body without colour and life." This is why the communes, so long as they themselves did not strive to become States and to impose submission around them so as to create "a vast body without colour or life", always grew up, always came out younger and stronger after every struggle; this is why they flourished at the sound of arms in the street, while two centuries later that same civilizationwas crumbling at the noise of wars brought About by States. In the commune, the struggle was for the conquest and maintenance of the liberty of the individual, for the principle of federation, for the right to unite and act; whereas the wars of the States aimed to destroy these liberties, to subjugate the individual, to annihilate free Agreement, to unite men in one and the same servitude before the king, the judge, the priest, and the State. There lies all the difference. There are struggles and conflicts that kill. And there are those that launch humanity forward. VI. In the course of the sixteenth century, modem barbarians come and destroy the whole civilization of the cities of the Middle Ages. These barbarians do not completely annihilate it; they cannot do so, but at least they check its progress for two or three centuries, and drive it in a new direction. They fetter the individual, take all his liberties away, order him to forget the unions which were based formerly on free initiative and free agreement, and their aim is to level the whole of society in the same submission to the master. They destroy all bonds between men, by declaring that State and Church alone must henceforth constitute the union between the subjects of a State; that only Church and State have the mission of watching over industrial, commercial, judiciary, artistic and passional interests, for which men of the twelfth century had been wont to unite directly. And who are those barbarians? They are the State, the Triple Alliance, constituted at last, of the military chief, the Roman judge, and the priest, forming a mutual insurance for domination, united in one power that will command in the name of the interests of society and will crush that society. We naturally ask ourselves, how these new barbarians could get mastery over the communes, formerly so powerful? Where did they get their strength for conquest? That strength they first found in the village. As the communes of ancient Greece did not manage to abolish slavery, so the communes of the Middle Ages were not able to emancipate the peasant from serfqom at the same time as they emancipated the citizen. It is true that nearly everywhere, at the time of his emancipation, 25 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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